Question : TS Profile for Citrix

I have recently implemented a Citrix 4.5 farm.  However, I noticed that the presentation servers have their own local profiles for the users.  I am thinking of the best way to address this but want to use the most effective... for stance...

I can connect all the servers to a shared storage and share a single profile directory and user GPO to point the TS profile to that directory

or
I can defines replicate the folders amongst one another using DFS or another respective tool

or

use roaming profiles...


suggestions?

Answer : TS Profile for Citrix

Unless your farms published apps and desktops are not load balanced across multiple servers,  you do not want to use local profiles, because each time a user logs in they are going to have different settings. Imagine, a user saves an important spreadsheet to the desktop, and then next day its not there. They can call the helpdesk.

Depending on your sites needs, you would choose either roaming profiles which are centrally stored on some file server, roaming mandatory profiles, multiple profiiles, or hybrid.

Roaming profiles will suffice where you are simply publishing desktops, and you want to allow users to retain their settings. The problem with roaming profiles is that they get filled with crap, grow, become corrupted and create a lot of headaches.

Mandatory profiles are similar to roaming profiles. An administrator creates a mandatory profile by saving  the dat file as user.man. With mandatory profile each time a user logs out their changes are lost.

If you have an application silo type environment, you may want to use a combination of mandatory and roaming, or what is known multiple profiles. Each time a user logs in a new profile is created which retains their settings from their roaming profile as settings from a mandatory profile. This is achieved with logon scripts in ADM.

Finally, for very complex environments you have hybrid profiles with the use of vb scripting.

You can learn about the different profiles at http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX110351

Other best practises for profiles in TS environments include the following:

1 Set the PS server to delete local profiles on logoff
2. In ADM create redirects for the following My Documents, Application Data, Desktop, Cookies, Favourites, Templates
3. Exclude these directories from uploading My documents, print neighbhourhod, application data
4. Set the location of the profile in Terminal Services tab.